


With Composure Uncracked

by Night-Mare (Aoife)



Series: Cracks 'verse - All [3]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe, BAMF Women Character(s), Dark fic, Estraneo being Estraneo, Flame Active Character(s), Gen, POV Hibari Kyouya's Mother, Side Story, Sky Sawada Nana
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-01 01:46:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10911813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aoife/pseuds/Night-Mare
Summary: The second side fic toBetween the Cracks. Another set of parents react to the fact their sons are missing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Saj_te_Gyuhyall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saj_te_Gyuhyall/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Between the Cracks](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10896882) by [Night-Mare (Aoife)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aoife/pseuds/Night-Mare). 



Her son misses his daily check-in. 

Kyoya knows better than to do that; knows that those check-ins, and his household staff are the only reason he is allowed to stay in Namimori and out of the spotlight she and his father live in. Her son is too much the Cloud and too young, too unpolished to play the dutiful politician's son and this is the compromise the three of them have chosen - even if she would rather be in Namimori to shape and nurture him, she chose to catch his father, and there was a price to be paid. At least he had her Kuskabe-chan and his own Tetsuya-kun, and knew that she herself adored her little Cloud.

Politician's wife she may be, now, but her husband and her have an understanding; first and foremost she is Kyoya's mother, and her eight year old boy, for all he is a Cloud and has been trained by her father, is still just a little boy. Her husband will just have to cover for her absence - she's going home. Hopefully her son has just had an accident, but it was unlikely; it was far more likely that someone had actively prevented him calling-in. The gods would have to help the cause of her son's missed call-in, because she had no intention of being merciful.

Her arrival in Namimori will never be subtle; not with the cavalcade that comes with being a wife of a member of the cabinet, and the first sight of her hometown makes her ache, but she's a Misty Cloud, and she's half-a-step away from the Prime Minister. That thought doesn't stop her regretting the decisions that bring her here - that her son is missing, presumably kidnapped - but she has all the vices of her Flames, and she's not ashamed of them.

There's someone waiting for her when she steps into the kitchen of Kyoya's house; Tetsuya's mother, her own right hand has suspiciously red eyes, and her Flames bristle. This is larger than just her son.

"Hibari-kun's tonfas and my Te-kun's fans were found, bloodied and discarded about three hours ago, Hibari-sama." There's a hitch in her right hand's voice at the mention of her son. "And my men report seeing Yamamoto Tsuyoshi departing Namimori on a motorbike, wearing what could only be Shigure Kintoki slung across his back. Once we put those two facts together - further checks confirmed that someone has taken the children you'd identified as being Hibari-kun's peers, including the Sawada child."

She hisses, and her eyes bleed the purple and dark blue of her Flames - though the entirety of Japan is her territory now, her son and Namimori will always be at its core. Her Kuskabe-chan doesn't flinch, but it's a hard-won lack of response, she knows. 

Those children being gone, alongside her Kyo-kun meant that the Underworld had decided to make her child pay for her and her father's sins; she refused to let them have him without a fight. "The other parents?"

"Sawada Nana is at the hospital; they've tried to notify the Young Lion," the look on her right hand's face was disgusted - and rightly so. She tolerated the presence of the man's family, especially once she realised that Tsunayoshi was a Vongola Sky, likely strong enough for her little boy, but he had placed no guard and rarely visited. "I talked to her; she's out of it, on a heavy dose of opiates, but described men that could only be mafioso coming for her son." Her right hand starts to add something else then stopped; allowing her to consider the information she'd been given.

"Hn. Tsuyoshi-kun will be travelling on his old passport. Track him; he'll lead us to the boys. Collect the civilian parents; I will ... mislead them." Her right hand winces, but doesn't protest. "While you do that, I will speak to my father; I can't disappear for long, but he has contacts in Italy that may be able to assist Tsuyoshi-kun." Her Kuskabe-chan's spine has straighten with her assumption of command, and there's the start of a carnivore's grin on her lips at the thought of the chaos Tsuyoshi will cause, looking for his son.

Kuskabe-chan turns and leaves, pulling an ultra-modern cell from her pocket and starts to make a number of calls; her right-hand really was very efficient. It was likely that the other woman will have the police officers assigned to the cases waiting for her, too. But first, her father.


	2. Chapter 2

She has to leave a series of messages for her father; he's on a mission somewhere in rural China. That makes her bite her lip briefly, as she's in private and begin to draft the note to be sent to the consulate in Milan and the embassy in Rome, to insure that they will provide appropriate assistance to her son - or any of the other children - should they make it to one of the two buildings. She doubts they will, but she will insure her bases are adequately covered. She also starts to draft the explanatory note for her taking an impromptu trip to Italy, but tears it up again, and stalks out of Kyoya-kun's study.

Her presence in Italy - her men had manage to trace Tsuyoshi's route to the airstrip, and she Kuskabe-chan had texted her a confirmation that the assassin was on a flight to Rome - was unlikely to help, and she had spent years staying away from Skies; none interested her, and if she had to come within 'fishing' distance of one, there was going to be a bloody - and public - murder. She had no desire for a Sky at this point in her life, and any attempt to force a bond would make said Sky's death a suicide.

What she could do, would be to manage things here in Japan, and insure that the other parents didn't put her son at risk, and to make it clear to the Yakuza that copying the idiot Italians would not be acceptable behaviour. That at least would let her have a little stress relief between meetings ... and hmm. She could take some of that stress out on the Italian ambassador, and the rest on her husband; that was one of the things he was there for.

Her Kuskabe-chan was as efficient as always; there were four sets of parents - six adults in total, and she stuck her best Politician's wife smile on her face and let her Flames seep out from her, carefully watching to see if any of them 'saw' her Mist - it was a rare Mundane who could, but if any of them did, she would need to handle them separately. None of them so much as twitched, and then she tasted the tea Kuskabe-chan had been serving, and her right-hand was just as efficient as she generally expected the woman to be. Her Flames neutralised the hypnotics the tea was loaded with.

"Our children have not been kidnapped." Her Flames ebb and flow in the room, and she feels a little bit dirty doing this, but the problem is that there is no way that these purely civilian parents will be able to get their children back. Not with Omertà and Mist Flames involved. The safest thing for everyone will be for them to 'forget' their children are missing. She presses against their minds, weaving the illusion for them. "They're on a school trip." The combination of the drugged tea and the sheer weight of her Flames has them succumbing, one by one to what she's saying. It helps that Tsuyoshi has 'disappeared'; it means she can cast him as chaperone.

Miura-san is surprisingly resistant, but she Propagates her illusion another three-fold, and even he succumbs. She'll have to look into his background later. Having him break the illusion, before Tsuyoshi found the children and an assessment could be made of the safety - or otherwise - of allowing them to return home, would be problematic. The school trip was a convenient lie; something that she had been able to have her men plant the documentation for fairly easily. If this situation lasted too long, it would become it's own problem, but in the worst case scenario ... faking the children's deaths would not be that hard.

If seeing his mother injured had forced Tsunayoshi to go Active - and the presence of an Active Sky had brought the others over the threshold with him - there would be an unholy mess to sort out before the children could come home. The idea of a five year old Sky with a full 'set' devoted to him was a little terrifying.

The police are easier to deal with. They're only investigating Sawada Nana's injuries and Tsunayoshi's disappearance at this point; the culprits in the rest of the kidnappings had been careful to use Mist Flames to imitate the parents, to draw the children away, and she had to give them a certain amount of credit. She wondered what Tsuyoshi had caught onto that had allowed him to get such a head start on the hunt, and what Nana had 'seen' that the mafioso had stabbed her.

(The downside to the illusions she was weaving was that she was stuck within a few hours radius of Namimori to maintain them until the children came home.)


	3. Chapter 3

The hospital staff are definitely relieved to see her; she and her mother had them well trained that the strange and the unusual in Namimori is their responsibility, and Nana-san definitely currently qualifies. Nana-san - she refuses to call the woman by her ‘husband’s’ name - is a traumatised and newly Active Sky.

Not that the hospital staff realise that that's what her problem is; they have her sedated because every time they let her wake up she starts screaming, and then, within moments all of the patients around her start screaming, too. Her Harmony is creeping outwards from the room she's in, looking for her son, or failing that, her Elements, and it means that the pain of the other patients in the hospital are overwhelming her.

Her Flames are heavy even outside the private room, and she has to keep a tight grip on her own desire for a Sky all of a sudden - which surprises her. Because she’s never been attracted to any of the other Skies she’s met - and she’s met more than a dozen over the course over the twenty years she’s been Flame Active. It’s not just that Nana-san is female - her father had introduced her to the Giglio-Nero, and she had had no attraction to her at all.

When she opens the door to Nana-san’s private room, the Flames almost swamp her. She swallows and steps into the maelstrom. She still has to take several deep breaths before she’s _sure_ that she won’t slip and succumb. The woman in the hospital bed is visibly battered; having obviously been pistol whipped more than once, and her wrist and lower left arm are wrapped in plaster.

There's very little she can do for the woman to help her, other than to allow her to form the bond she’s seeking - it would stabilise her, would allow her Flames a point of reference. If Nana-san was anyone else, she’d send for their spouse first of all, and talk them through doing what she needed, but the Young Lion had already proven that he neither deserved a Sky nor would treat her appropriately.

It would be easy to allow the bond to form, even with Nana-san unconscious, but she refuses to take advantage of the woman; that would make her no better than the Young Lion. She extends a tendril of her Mist, achingly slowly, keeping it _purely_ her weaker Mist to try and avoid Nana-san latching onto it and starting the bond, and encourages Nana's system to burn off the sedation.

It takes a few minutes for it to leave her system, and then the woman’s eyes _snap_ open, Sky Orange, and visible to her as a fellow flame user, there was the flame of Dying Will Mode on her forehead. "Nana-san? I'm Mei-Lin. What do you remember?"

“They _took_ my Tsu-kun. I couldn’t stop them.” The Flame pressure in the room only increases, and she has to fight to maintain her own Will; she was doing her part in getting Tsunayoshi back, and she _holds_ on to that. “I want him _back_.”

“Nana. I need you to take a deep breath.” She laces a thread of hypnotic command into her voice, a Mist trick that made life as a politician’s wife far simpler; it had it’s limitations, but here and now - here and now, it allowed her to talk the new Sky in front of her into reeling her Flames in and through what was happening.

That takes a good hour; it’s just as well that she’s not expecting any news from the search. Even Tsuyoshi would only have been on the ground for a few hours, and while she knew the man was _good_ and his Sword uncanny, there was only so quickly he could move.

But she has explained. Everything she knows, under that focused, Sky Orange gaze. She can’t do anything else, and a tiny part of her wants to Rage at having been so thoroughly caught. She eyes the woman in the bed warily, and asks the last question she’d ever thought she’d need to ask. “So. Bearing all of that in mind, Nana-chan, do you want me as your Cloud?” She steels herself for the answer, her grip on her Cloud Flames still impossibly tight.

“Yes.” She releases her grip at the affirmation, and the bond _snaps_ into place, like she’s been waiting for it for _years_. And _oh_. She’s _Home_ , in a way that she’s never been before, and she’ll _kill_ the Young Lion before she lets him near her Sky; how could he have left her all alone? And how could the world be so cruel as to put them through  _this_ , in order to find each other.

Nana’s Flames reach out to her hungrily, but she’s strong enough to balance her Sky on her own for now; there will need to be other Elements in their ‘set’ soon, though. Especially if they fail to retrieve Tsunayoshi and her Kyoya-kun quickly, and she contemplates the other Flame Actives she’s aware of, and would be willing to share her Sky with. The first list is long; the second far shorter.

Their conversation and the exertion of her Flames have Nana exhausted, and she leaves the other woman to sleep; she has more work to do. (She terrorises the hospital staff on the way out; they will stop phoning the Young Lion, and instead keep _her_ informed. Or she will ‘bite them to death’, to borrow her son’s catch phrase.)


	4. Chapter 4

Kuskabe-chan enters Kyoya-kun's study, where she's working on documents for her husband, almost at a run, and hands her a phone handset - the woman looks almost hopeful, and has her thumb over the mic.

"It's a woman; asking to speak to you. Claims she's a colleague of Fon-sama, -" hope rises in her chest, and she fights it out of reflex; hope is dangerous, and there's no way that her son had been found yet, unless he's dead and has been discarded.

"Hibari Mei-lin. Is it Lal Mirch or Giglio-Nero Aria I'm speaking to, and may I assume you heard from my father?" She picks up a paperweight to toy with while she's talking to the other Arcobaleno.

"Lal Mirch. And no; I haven't heard from Fon for more than a month -" she throws the paperweight and watches it smash; she racks her brain trying to remember what her father had told her about the broken Arcobaleno. Why would the woman be ringing her, if it wasn't on her father's request? "I can check with the others though?"

"Hn." She means yes, and thank you, but it'll be interesting to see if the broken Arcobaleno understands.

"I'm with the CEDEF," Damn. She's going to owe Kyoya-kun the refurbishment of his study that her little Cloud had been pushing for at this rate. That was his paperweight _and_ his desk she'd just broken. Then again, if this drove him Active, she'd have needed to refurbish _anyway_ ; it would never have survived him. "and there have been a number of phone messages left for my CO." Her own anger seeps into her voice." And _oh_. That was _interesting._ The woman - the Arcobaleno - that the Young Lion trusted at the very least with access to his office, if not his family, was angry with the man; she could work with that. Lal Mirch might be the broken Arcobaleno, but her strength was still up there with her father's.

"The Young Lion is as frustrating to work for as he is for the rest of us to interact with." She allows a measured amount of sympathy and irritation to seep into her voice, and weaves a little of her Mist into it, too. It would be more effective if the two of them were speaking face to face, but it was still effective _enough_. "I'm assuming you're ringing about his wife and his son, then, Lal Mirch? Care to share why the man hasn't bothered to do the same?" She allows a little more of her own lethality to seep into her voice, a reminder for the broken Arcobaleno that she was at least as dangerous as the woman herself.

"I am. And yes, he is an unmitigated pain in my ass." She allows a bitter chuckle to slip her lips at the admission - it seemed that either that thread of Mist was doing it's job, _or_ Lal Mirch was feeling remarkably inclined to scathing honesty _anyway_. "He's on a 'mission'." There are rather prominent air quotes around the word 'mission', and she debates whether the Arcobaleno means an actual mission, or is with his mistress. She decides it could be either.

"I see. Then the man is fool, and his wife deserves better." She puts an appropriately salacious emphasis on her turn of phrase, before becoming far more brusque and business-like, allowing her Rage to seep into her voice. "Nana-san is hospitalised, and newly Active as a Sky; Tsunayoshi-kun is missing - as are a number of other children from my town."

"How many are missing, Kasumi?" Gotcha. She had Lal Mirch in the palm of her hand; the woman had been being so careful to address her as Mei-Lin.

"Oh you are well informed, Lal Mirch. I'm afraid I don't know your own birth name. Including my son, there are nine children missing from my town. The evidence suggests Italian Flame Mafioso; I want my son back. Be glad that politics mean I cannot come and Rage in Italy, Lal Mirch." Her voice is icy cold now, the Rage she's riding so very close to the surface. She's well aware of how the woman-she's-speaking-to's Flames broke, that rather than Rain, her Flames manifest as her own do, and she would be quite happy to set Lal Mirch Raging in her place in Italy.

"Is one of them Tsuyoshi Yamamoto's son?" She can hear how she's fraying Lal Mirch's self control, and she claps her question with a certain amount of maliciousness.

"Oh I do hope he's making a mess. Yes; his son Takeshi was taken from his little league practise by someone wearing an illusion of him. His body count is up to three by my men's estimate -" Her voice is perhaps inappropriately gleeful at the thought of the way the Rain was behaving, but he was only doing what she wished to do, so. "- and that's not counting anyone dead since he set foot in Italy." She manages to make her voice sound serious again, though. "Find my son, Lal Mirch, before I manage to talk the Prime Minister into letting me loose; and tell your idiot CO that if he set foot in Namimori, he's dead. His wife is now my Sky, and I refuse to let him near her."

She puts the phone down before the other woman can say anything else; a deliberate move to leave the other Cloud to stew in her induced Rage; she probably should feel sorry for the Young Lion, for how easy it was to turn his own people against him, but as far as she was concerned, the man deserved it.


	5. Chapter 5

She hates being helpless. She doesn't do _helpless_ gracefully. But her son is missing, her Sky is injured and her father is out of contact. And international politics prevented her from doing anything herself _directly_. The soonest she would be permitted by the Prime Minister to enter Italy with diplomatic immunity had been six weeks the day her Kyoya-kun had been taken; she still had three weeks to go and she was getting impatient. (She could go without that immunity, but she wasn't stupid; she would almost certainly end up burning several prominent Italian men to death - not that she was planning to get caught, but preparing an exit route was only sensible. She had a Sky to consider.)

The sensation of being helpless _grates_. She drags her Kuskabe-chan to the hospital and leaves both women to talk - her second is an entirely capable Lightning, more than willing to talk sense into her; Tetsuya had been a Rain, more what her son needed in a right hand; Kuskabe-chan's father had been a Sun; which had been what her mother needed. She's not surprised when they bond; not with her bond to her right-hand and her having already bonded to Nana-chan, and their shared distress. (She was quietly relieved that Tetsuya hadn't died trying to keep Kyoya from being taken; the two boys were well enough trained, even if the rest of the group wasn't, to keep them together and alive for as long as humanly possible. And if her little carnivore hadn't bonded to Tsunayoshi, Tetsuya would insist that Kyoya bring all of the other children out with them.)

It makes her feel better about assigning Kuskabe-chan to guard their Sky though - whilst she didn't subscribe to the notion of the western Flame Users that Lightnings were meat shields, her right hand was quite the capable bodyguard and strong enough to keep Nana stable until they found the missing children and her other primary Elements. The fact that she then couldn't manage the ongoing Japanese side of the investigation was a bonus, she tells herself. It gave her something to do in addition to terrifying the local populace back into something like order. Her son's absence had the local Yazuka playing up.

Not that they were any match for her, but 'biting them to death' wore her out for enough that she could actually sleep by collapsing with exhaustion; she couldn't otherwise - with Kyoya having been gone for more than two weeks, even she had succumbed to anxiety. And the exertion required made it clear she needed to work on her stamina. Especially now that she has a Sky. Nana was _hers_. Even if she might have to go toe-to-toe with an _acknowledged_ Vongola Sky to keep her.

She had moved Nana into her Kyoya-kun's mansion for now after her discharge from hospital; her son - if he lived - was likely Active by now and probably bonded to the woman's son if the boys had been kept together; he'd mutter about her presumption in taking possession of his territory, but it was only a temporary measure. And he had 'allowed' himself to be taken. She'd be training and teasing him with that one for _years_. Especially if he'd acquired his own Vongola Sky.

And even if his father hadn't been a known Sky from. Vongola line, now she'd seen pictures of Tsunayoshi, his resemblance to the First Vongola Sky, the one who had moved to Namimori and called himself Ieyasu was uncanny. (They were Hibari; every resident of their territory was 'registered'; all the way back to the Family's founding.)

The illusion has grown more complex, too. The children were now in an isolation ward at the Namimori hospital - or at least an illusion of them was. A very convincing illusion which she at least only had to maintain during visitors' hours. And it was easy enough for her to work in a side room off the empty ward and project the illusion of the children sleeping, with Tsuyoshi and Takeshi curled up together on a bed to add to the authenticity, and her Kyoya-kun wrapped around the form of the boy she was fairly sure was now his Sky, to get people accustomed to the idea her little carnivore would defend the tiny Sky ruthlessly.

Reports from Italy have her lips curling into something that could be a smile; she'd known Tsuyoshi had been notorious, but he hasn't lost his edge in two weeks of killing with little to no sleep; her fingers itched to get a look at Shigure Kintoki. It was a peculiar weapon even by the standards of the Flame Users; she'd seen the corpses of the men that had committed seppuku after encounters with Tsuyoshi; encounters that the CCTV - now wiped - had only shown the Rain looking disappointed in them, but the sword glowing faintly.

She's working in that side room both when she hears about 'Basil' and about the havoc that two of her father's other colleagues were creating with one of the younger Skies of the Alliance; that children were beginning to be found had given her a certain amount of hope. That the children found were those who had been capable of going Flame Active and surviving _torture_? That made her hunger to Rage, a Rage barely sated by the knowledge that three of her father's colleagues were now tearing apart Italy along with Tsuyoshi.


End file.
